Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Come to You – “‘There are three ways in which a man expresses deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the second level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Cry for help – Isn’t punctuation wonderful? With these little extra characters in language, we can convey the emotional context of a sentence. Just imagine what writing would be like without ! or “ ”, or ? Why, you’d have to…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Hear – Moses and David. The great Shema and the lesser Shema. “Hear, O Israel” and “YHVH, hear my prayer.” Both from the same root and the same consciousness. Both dependent on relationship. And both with multiple Semitic meanings. “šāmaʿ has…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Hear – If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound? An interesting existential question. What is the relationship between a physical event and the perception of the event? If God…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Complaint – You’re praying. You feel oppressed and downtrodden. You acknowledge your total dependency on God. You’re weak; He’s strong. You kneel before Him—His servant, His child. And you complain? Before we tackle the noun “complaint” we…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Before – A curious thing has happened in this verse. The English order doesn’t follow the Hebrew order. In Hebrew, the phrase “before the Lord” comes after “is weak (is faint).” The Hebrew verse reads: “A…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Weak – Amazingly, our word “weak” isn’t found in the languages of Europe until the 12th Century. I guess before that people never knew what it meant to be physically exhausted (No, probably not. There are…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Afflicted – The Hebrew word ʿānî comes from a root that means “to force,” or “to try to force submission,” and “to punish or inflict pain upon.”[1] Here the noun describes someone who is feeling the…
Prayer of an Afflicted Man for Mercy on Himself and on Zion. A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Prayer – In the NASB, these two statements have no verse numbers. They are treated as introductory summaries before the text of the actual…
“ . . . and if I perish, I perish.” Esther 4:16 NASB Perish – Would you die for the cause? I imagine your answer will be conditioned by an assessment of the cause. Is it worth dying for? But what if you believe you will die either way? If you choose to stand up…
